autobiography
Americannoun
-
autobiographies
plural
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of autobiography
Explanation
You are writing an autobiography when you write your own life story. A writer who writes an autobiography is like a painter who paints a self-portrait. If you intend to write your autobiography one day, it might be a good idea to start recording notes about your life in a diary. The author Gertrude Stein was being clever when she poked fun at the very idea of autobiography when she wrote her own memoirs but titled them The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, instead of The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein.
Vocabulary lists containing autobiography
Words to Live By: Bio
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Write On!: Graph and Gram
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To Thine Own Self Be True: Auto
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
In her memoir, “A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving,” Ms. Eubanks recalls that in the years after the attack, she scoured the literature on PTSD, from clinical studies and self-help texts to autobiography and fiction.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 20, 2026
“Which sounds ridiculous, because I’ve made movies where I play myself and I use my own name, but it just seemed that in the true Matt Johnson autobiography, I wouldn’t be able to appear.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 11, 2026
But Belafonte’s celebrity exacted a toll, as he documented in a late-life autobiography that Mr. Jelly-Schapiro draws on heavily.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 7, 2026
In his 2012 autobiography "An American Son," the man oft-memed as the "viceroy" of Cuba, recounts boasting to his exiled Cuban grandfather that he would one day overthrow Fidel Castro and free Cuba.
From Barron's ● Jul. 29, 2026
“It was better to announce my engagement by letter than to wait until I returned home, as thus I might draw the hottest fire while still in safe harbor,” she wrote in her autobiography.
From "Votes for Women!" by Winifred Conkling
So I love to look for vegan books, nutrition books, rock biographies and autobiographies.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 24, 2026
The book’s leading actors have been subjects of biographies and autobiographies, and most events have been exhaustively covered in scholarly and popular histories and articles as well as media reports.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 16, 2025
Chapter 9 is about Frederick Douglass and identity-aware liberalism, as expressed through his autobiographies.
From Salon ● Nov. 10, 2024
Eruption, which had original working titles of The Black Zone and Vulcan, is Patterson's first attempt at posthumous publishing - but he is familiar with high-profile collaborations, having written Bill Clinton and Dolly Parton's autobiographies.
From BBC ● Jun. 3, 2024
In their autobiographies, they recounted great races in intimate detail, but falls and injuries were glossed over with the most perfunctory language.
From "Seabiscuit: An American Legend" by Laura Hillenbrand
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
